Since human body systems are complicated, once researchers desire to realize how drugs influence a human body, they often firstly experiment at cellular level. According to the experiment results including a series of changes in cell morphology and metabolism, they may predict the probable model of human reaction, and evaluate activity and toxicity of the drugs. If experiments can be more directly implemented in tissue to identify their activity and toxicity, the results should be more close to human researches.
Traditional methods for culturing liver tissues include: (A) static culture, (B) dynamic culture, (C) single-sided perfusion culture, and (D) double-sided perfusion culture. The methods of (A) static culture and (B) dynamic culture both have a drawback that fresh medium can't efficiently diffuse into liver tissues. This causes that cells of liver tissues will die after static culturing for a while, and during the time they will lose their basic functions gradually then totally lose their functions in the end. Until now, the culturing period for a clinical liver tissue culture are 3 to 5 days at most. Although the methods of (C) single-sided perfusion culture and (D) double-sided perfusion culture may raise the viability of liver tissues by single-sided perfusion and double-sided perfusion. However, lacking of excellent designs of used apparatuses, the liver tissues cannot be efficiently supplied with nutrients yet. Without obtaining sufficient nutrients, the cells of liver tissues have a tendency to die, and it finally causes the whole liver tissue becomes necrotic. Therefore, it is advantageous to develop a device which may efficiently provide the liver tissues therein with sufficient nutrients, thus the viability can be raised.
As miniaturization technology becomes more and more mature, traditional culture dishes are gradually replaced by microchips. In particular, while performing researches for drugs, applying miniaturization technology can greatly save the amount of samples, and also perform multiple reactions simultaneously.
In order to combine advantages of the prior art and improve its drawbacks, as great efforts and plenty of experiments have done, the mcirofluidic chip of the present invention is finally developed. By the present invention, cultured tissues not only extend their survival time and maintain the basic functions but also accelerate the researches for drugs to human tissues through the miniaturization technology.